I am a long time Linux/Nvidia user and have been enjoying vdpau on my desktop for years :) However i have recently build a HTPC with a Asus E35M1-M PRO mainboard featuring a AMD E-350 APU (1,6 GHz dual core CPU and Radeon HD 6310 graphics card. Having heard that the catalyst driver has catched up to nvidia in recent days, i thougt i'd give AMD a try.

I am running a current Arch Linux with MythTV 0.24.1 and the proprietary catalyst driver from AUR. My window manager is fluxbox and i don't use composite 3D-desktop stuff or whatever it's called currently. Catalyst seems to run the way it's supposed to run, direct rendering is working.

Unfortunately even the standard 720x576 MPEG2 DVB-C doesn't run smooth and seems to be lagging behind and loosing frames (plus the ATI standard tearing :rolleyes:). This is the case for XVideo and OpenGL. XVmC doesn't work and VDPAU obviously does neither. The cpu load is at roughly 70-80% on both cores (< 10% on nvidia even without VDPAU!!!).

I am suspecting i am missing some essential "ATI magic" in xorg.conf or with ati-config to get XV to work in a acceptable way. Does anybody have some pointers?

09-28-2011, 02:50 AM

pagan

After evenings full of struggle messing around with xorg.conf, aticonfig and amdcccle i went back to my old Asus M3N78-VM with nvidia graphics. I tried everything out of the Arch Linux forum, wiki and several pages of those ever present Ubuntu hits from google, but i wasn't able to fix the sluggish and high CPU load playback even of "SD" video.

On nvidia it's a simple

Code:

Driver "nvidia"

in xorg.conf and everything works without any further hassle...

Perhaps i'll give a ATI/AMD GPU another try in a few years, but i really doubt it will be any better.

09-28-2011, 11:05 AM

Dandel

When using ATI it's a little awkward at times because the initial setup can be a little bit of trouble. The first step is to confirm the driver is working properly, and to do that you need to run this command from xorg:

Code:

fglrxinfo

if this is working it should output something similar to this: (The sample is for an old system, but current systems have similar outputs )